Meadows at Stockbridge Village, the regenerated Liverpool housing estate that was notorious when known as Cantril Farm. Photograph: Landlife

Children are scrabbling over fallen tree trunks, wobbling across a wooden bridge, chasing pigeons through the long grass, necks bobbing as they scatter. Shouts go up. Folk look fondly on. On this patch of green, two powerful fantasies are converging: the idyllic childhood played out in a countryside idyll.

Except this is not the countryside but an inner-city playground: London Fields in east London, also home to a wildflower meadow or two and a woodland section where the rangers have built enormous, rustic furniture out of fallen branches. Head through the park and you are at Broadway Market, where the rural theme continues with two weekly farmers' markets. A few miles further east lies the Olympic Park, where Danny Boyle's opening ceremony offered up another pastoral scene, of sheep, geese and rolling green.

There is nothing special about this playground. Like many in the Olympic borough of Hackney it has been spruced up, paint-chipped metal climbing frames replaced with wooden chalets, wooden forts, wooden and rope swings, giant boulders and, to hammer home the point, tree stumps. This ruralisation of play is happening all over Britain, from Kinross to Bristol.

"We've gone past the tipping point, with more wooden things going in than not," says Mark Hughes, who runs a playground furnishing company in Bath, called Big Wood Play. No one wants metal these days, he says. Not even the children. At one school, he was painting the wood blue, at the head's request, when the kids started protesting, "asking us what on earth we were doing. They thought it looked nicer natural."

A woodland walk? No, it's a wild wood area of London Fields in inner-city Hackney, east London. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Children's play is only the start of it. Everywhere you look, the countryside has crept into cities and towns – the way we shop, eat, read, dress, decorate our homes, spend our time. Street food is sold out of revamped agricultural trucks, or from village-delivery style bicycles. City-dwellers are booking into a growing number of courses on rural life; urban bees and chickens are commonplace (though do keep up: ducks are where it's at now). And when Rebekah Brooks wanted to get the prime minister's attention? "Let's discuss over country supper soon."

In Liverpool, according to Grant Luscombe, founder of environmental education charity Landlife, wildflower meadows have been sown across the city from a derelict site next to Anfield football stadium to an estate of tower blocks in nearby Kirkby, where schoolchildren bring their easels. "It's like Monet," he says.

It might seem a leap from the meadows of Liverpool – you could take a train to Euston in central London and be met by another wildflower meadow outside the station – to the beautiful artificial bird nests and dandelions that earlier this year decorated the famous windows of London department store Liberty, but there is something of the same impulse behind them all. We can't get enough nature in our lives.

It is a trend whose tendrils are wrapping around the walls of our homes with flora and fauna-themed wallpaper, rustic furniture and apparently endless bird ornaments, so you can celebrate the pastoral while stuck in front of the box – that's the box that's overrun with nature programming, of course. Or perhaps with your feet up and a copy of Robert McFarlane's bestselling The Old Ways, a paean to the delights of rambling.

Every other month Elle Decoration proclaims "the wonders of wood". Used apple crates are hailed as a stylish storage solution. The humble milking stool is exalted as a furniture shape of prototypical purity by hip designers such as Another Country, its proportions seeming to convey some sort of Platonic ideal. "A stool boiled down to a minimum", is how the man behind Another Country, Paul de Zwart, puts it, as if the chisel has scraped away the layers to release an essential simpleness lurking within. It is a beautiful stool, and a clever one. Appearing at once simple by nature and simple by design, it begs appreciation of all the complex calculations that have produced it, and promises to take its owner one step nearer to an uncomplicated life.

As De Zwart well knows, his stool demonstrates the most fashionable way to join a leg to a seat - with "a loose tongue", a traditional rustic device. If you don't know what that looks like, check your chairs. Where the top of the leg pokes through the seat, you will see a little wooden strip dissecting the circular top of the leg, like the line through a pill. (If your chair legs don't poke through the seat, there's no helping you.)

Not surprisingly, the most exalted woods in current design are not the exotics but humble pine and oak. Earthenware, with its coarser texture, is preferred to porcelain. Rushwork, basketwork, anything woven, raffia and wool, the sorts of tufty stuff your fingers bump and stumble over. It is a supremely clean way of getting a bit of rural life under your fingernails. This summer, you could even buy a Burberry basketweave hat for the basket-case price of $225 (£140). So why is this happening now?

Marcus Fairs, who founded online magazine Dezeen, thinks the recession has brought "a maturing of the urban attitude, and it doesn't feel right to have things that are too shiny and polished". Fairs, who grew up in the village of Thuxton, Hampshire, in the 1970s, also thinks "people got bored by the debate of countryside v city, and realised that the best part of the country could be brought into the city. The whole hipster look," he says, with its jeans that fall short, checked shirts, dungarees, belt-back trousers or waistcoats and homespun jumpers, "is quite Amish. Dalston [in Hackney] is full of people who look like farmers."

In architecture, he adds, the big move is "the return of windows that open" – which sounds worryingly as if someone has found a way to sell us fresh air.

When elements of rural life feel this fashionable, does that make our interest in all things country less valid, and more a kind of trendy role play?

Wild flowers at Anfield, Liverpool. Photograph: Landlife

It seems a little sad that, for many, the most instinctive way to access the best of the countryside is as consumers; as if what we are really buying into is a sort of processed pastoral. You can't eat a bag of crisps without knowing something of the field of potatoes that gave them life. Pipers Crisps spell it out, promising theirs are "made by farmers". You can snack on Urban Fruit (that's dried fruit) or buy loaves from self-proclaimed "city bakers" – "you know, like a city farm", says Lisa Brook, who runs Flour Power, in south-east London. She, incidentally, like Fairs, grew up in the country.

It is one of the conundrums of the urban search for a closer connection with the rural world that the search itself has resulted in a fancification of simple goods. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the humble egg, the beginning of all things.

These days an egg is rarely just an egg. If you are shopping at Waitrose, it might come from a Columbian blacktail, a Burford brown or a Cotswold legbar. And while you can still buy half a dozen medium or large, those old-style boxes look dowdy next to the brand-savvy Happy Eggs, One Good Egg, Posh Birds and Big and Fresh, and you don't have to shop at Waitrose for those.

Perhaps that is the best of both worlds. But then, that may depend on what we are looking for. Ralph Pite is a professor of literature at Bristol University, writing a book on "ideas of the simple life". He thinks one of the reasons for our hankering for rural contact is that "people find the countryside damaged when they travel to it, and want to bring back in their own spaces what has disappeared out there".

As a child, he would ride his bike for hours around Malvern. "My feeling of going to the countryside sometimes is a bit depressing. It's very industrialised, turned into a great factory floor for sugar beet or barley. It's not the countryside I'm looking for; it's not the one from childhood, and it's not the one the National Trust or television is telling me about."

Perhaps we are trying to fashion our own. It would not be unreasonable, after all, to respond to the perils of globalisation and irresponsible banking with a quest for more contact with nature, more attention to the provenance of small, everyday things.

As Pite says, "You can't just wish yourself out of your industrial society. You're always going to be committed to it, one way or another. It's a question of finding ways of working within it to make it better." That might mean scrambling over fallen tree trunks or scrambling a hen-specific egg. And, of course, as we continue to make those choices, the countryside, sensing an appetite, will change too.

The simple village store has already been made over in towns favoured by urban tourists, such as Cley in Norfolk or Orford in Suffolk, where the revamped General Store has a swanky typeface, immaculately aproned staff and wants "to reinvent the village store". Or again in St Ives, where the new Allotment Deli hints at veg with an urban vibe. "The comforts of home, and the comforts of the country in one," muses Pite, and you can see how that might be a compelling combination. Just as long as there is somewhere left to go when you want to get away from it all.